The Great Radio Spectrum Famine

Not even sci-fi writers foresaw what we'd be doing with our phones once technology put color screens and a lot of computing power in our pockets.

Now we know: We use them to stream YouTube and Facebook videos; we watch TV shows; we download and store songs and movies; we take pictures of everything going on around us; we read (and some of us even write) novels; we play video games; we surf the Web. Sometimes we even talk to each other. These days you can unleash a gusher of bits over the air that would have choked even a wired connection to the Internet not so long ago.

These transmissions consume radio bandwidth—lots of it. And they will take increasing amounts of this precious commodity as the iPad and its Androidgenous kin proliferate. People are already feeling the pinch.

Regulators have few options to head off the coming bandwidth crisis. They can't realistically expect to reduce demand. Nor can they expand the overall supply. That leaves the daunting chore of squeezing today's users into narrower slices of the radio spectrum, thereby eking out more space for other things. That's sometimes possible, but it's not easy. To reengineer existing radio systems—or their users—is a bit like trying to overhaul a car's engine while it's barreling down the highway.

Read the full IEEE article
The Great Radio Spectrum Famine by Mitchell Lazarus at:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/
the-great-radio-spectrum-famine

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